Professor Kendra Willson’s mother had lived in Stockholm, spoke Swedish and always talked of it as a magical place. Willson found a magical place of her own when she spent two years in Iceland after getting her undergraduate degree.
The opportunity came not from her Germanic languages department but through Willson’s music professor, who had spent time in Iceland looking at the influence of Icelandic folk music on contemporary Icelandic art music.
He knew Willson was taking Old Norse and suggested she apply for a fellowship to conduct research in Iceland.
“I thought, “˜That sounds like more fun than getting a job,’ so I went to Iceland,” Willson said.
The trip left a lasting impression.
“If you go someplace at age 21, learn all this language, learn to live in a different place, you leave a part of yourself there and you’re always yearning to get back there,” Willson said. “So I’m always homesick for Iceland.”
Willson is in her fourth year teaching at UCLA. She currently teaches a class on Old Norse.
Old Norse is the language of the 13th-century Icelandic and Norwegian sagas that tell the Norse gods, the settlement of Iceland and life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages.
This traditional language, however, is fairly close to modern Icelandic.
Willson gives the analogy that for modern English speakers, it’s like reading William Shakespeare instead of the more difficult Geoffrey Chaucer of the Middle Ages in England.
“I like the sound of Icelandic, it sounds sort of windy ““ (it) reminds me of the landscape in Iceland … a lot of cliffs and moss and so forth,” Willson said.
The close connection between the old and modern Iceland makes for a nation small enough to be a community, according to Willson. The people are very aware of their heritage and of the medieval texts written in Old Norse.
Because the language has changed so little, you can put together just a few words to cite a saga.
“And the people you’re talking to will probably get the reference,” Willson said. “It’s a very inter-textual society, very interconnected.”